A doctor pulls away the last bandaging from Daniel Coffey’s limp left wrist. “Holy moley,” Pat, Daniel’s father says, “I can’t believe it.” His mother, Alice, removes her glasses and wipes a tear.

On June 15, Dr. Thomas Trumble M.D., of the Overlake Hospital Medical Center, provided Daniel and his parents with what his mother calls “a miracle”, giving him voluntary movement in his left hand for the first time in over seven years.

Ten years ago Daniel, now 32, was in the passenger seat of a car accident that caused him severe back pain. Three years later he had an allergic reaction to a pain medication and when his parents found him he was almost dead.

After a week of treatment doctors told him that he was showing no signs of brain activity and that he never would.

Alice and Pat called their four daughters and began to plan his funeral. Later that night, they pulled the breathing tubes.

“He surprised us all.” Alice said. “Six and a half hours later he woke up laughing.”

Despite the recovery, Daniel was left a quadriplegic, confined to his wheelchair and unable to eat or speak.

The Coffeys placed him in a North Idaho medical home where he spent two years without improvement. Alice, who runs a certified family home of her own, decided that that wasn’t good enough and brought him home to live under her supervision.

“I said ‘I’m not going to accept that. We’ll make him something.'” she said. “We don’t know what that is. But, we’re not going to give up hope.”

Alice began feeding him popsicles and ice cream to build up the muscles in his throat and eventually moved on to crackers. He now eats numerous foods, especially spaghetti, which Alice says is his favorite.

Daniel also spends hours a month in a hyperbaric chamber that helps to heal his body and mind. Pat noted that his son has raised his arm often in recent months and on one occasion both parents heard him say his “mom.”

The incident also left him with a wrist and palm deformity, causing both hands to extend backwards into a fist. Alice placed carrot toys in each of her son’s palms to stop his fingernails from digging into the skin and causing infection.

Doctors in North Idaho, where the Daniel lives with his parents, told him that they would have to amputate his thumbs. The couple considered the operation before three months ago when Pat, 70, saw Trumble for severe arthritis he had in his own wrist.

Before heading into surgery, Pat mentioned Daniel and Trumble said that he’d be willing help him.

Eight weeks later Daniel arrived at Overlake for surgery. The surgery, which Trumble has been doing for 25 years (even writing a chapter in a textbook about it), lengthened the tendons in his wrist.

But, while some movement will certainly be regained in his hand, Trumble says that the extent of “the improvement will be just as much mental as it is physical”.

Alice plans on having her son’s right hand operated on as well and undoubtedly Trumble will be the surgeon.

“You just never give up on young people,”. Trumble said.